Creative Time’s Anne Pasternak appointed director of the Brooklyn Museum

Former president and artistic director of Creative Time, Anne Pasternak, has been appointed the director of the Brooklyn Museum, replacing outgoing director Arnold L. Lehman, who has served the museum since 1997. Pasternak, who built Creative Time into one of the world’s leading art organizations, will continue Lehman’s publicly-engaged mission going forward, bringing her own take on public art and programming and the “other ways that artists want to contribute to public ideas,” as she put it in a 2013 interview with Paper Magazine.

Newly-appointed director of the Brooklyn Museum Anne Pasternak

Pasternak joined Creative Time as their only employee in 1994, when the fledgling organization had a budget of $375,000. She saw the budget increase to over $3 million, and, over the course of 21 years, she shed light on many rising artists, including Iranian video artist Shirin Neshat and Brazilian artist and photographer Vik Muniz.

Much of her latest work has been engaged with ideas about cities such as urban development, gentrification, and placemaking. She has taken positions and organized events that tackle big ideas, taking public art beyond the realm of the spectacular and into a more engaged, civic-minded discourse about the issues in the world today. This has included everything from the Tribute in Light at Ground Zero by John Bennett, Gustavo Bonevardi, Julian LaVerdiere, Paul Marantz, Paul Myoda, and Richard Nash Gould, in memory of 9/11, to the annual Creative Time Summit, which has become the standard for art conferences, and the largest art and social justice gathering in the world.